Tag Archives: cancellation

Async programming in C# used to be hard; thanks to .NET 4’s Task Parallel Library and C# 5’s async/await feature, it has become fairly easy, and as a result, is becoming much more common. At the same time, a standardized approach to cancellation has been introduced : cancellation tokens. The basic idea is that you create a CancellationTokenSource that controls the cancellation, and pass the token it provides to the method that you want to be able to cancel. That method will then pass it to the other methods it calls, if they can be canceled, and/or regularly check if cancellation was requested. Upon cancellation, the method will typically throw an OperationCanceledException. Quick and dirty example:

In this case, StopAsyncOperation would be called, for instance, if the user chooses to abort the operation.

This all works pretty well and is rather easy to setup. But what if there is another reason to cancel the operation, known only by the BusinessService and outside the control of the calling method? That’s where the CancellationSource.CreateLinkedTokenSource method comes into play; basically, this method creates a cancellation source that will be canceled when any of the specified tokens is canceled.

Let’s start with a simple case: you have another cancellation token that you also want to take into account. The code would look like this:

We created a linked cancellation source based on the two cancellation tokens, then used the token from this new source instead of cancellationToken. If either cancellationToken or otherToken is canceled, linkedCts.Token will be canceled as well. If necessary, the calling code can detect how the operation was canceled by checking the CancellationToken property of the OperationCanceledException.

Now let’s see a slightly more difficult case: the second cancellation source is actually an event. You want to cancel the operation when the event occurs, in addition to user cancellation represented by the cancellationToken parameter. So you need to subscribe to the event and trigger the cancellation when it occurs. Here’s a way to do it:

Here we only pass cancellationToken to CreateLinkedTokenSource, and we directly cancel linkedCts when the event is raised. The code is getting a bit convoluted, but it achieves the desired result.

I can’t really give you a specific real-world use case of this technique, because the cases where I used it are too specific to be of public interest, but I can outline the general scenario. I have a long running operation that is made up of multiple long running operations. The whole operation can be canceled globally, and each of the sub-operations can also be canceled individually, without affecting the others. Here’s the rough outline of what it looks like: